Announcing Zero RFI

An AI Platform Company Transforming the Construction Industry

If you’ve been reading this newsletter or listening to the podcast for a while, you probably picked up on some breadcrumbs. The conversations about information asymmetry. The pieces about construction tech’s deflationary effect on every industry but one. The persistent question: if the owner is paying for everything, why do they have the least information?

Today I can finally talk about it.

I’m launching a company called Zero RFI. We just closed a $13.8 million seed round led by General Catalyst. Here is the formal Press Release

Let me tell you why.

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The Problem No One Is Solving

I’ve spent 25 years at the intersection of construction and technology. I’ve built companies, invested in them, advised them, and watched one after one try to fix construction’s productivity problem by selling tools to contractors and architects.

Here’s what nobody talks about: the only people actually suffering from construction’s lack of productivity are the owners. The people paying for the buildings.

Think about it. If you’re an architect and the industry is inefficient, you bill more hours. If you’re a contractor and projects run over, you’re still getting paid. The fragmentation, the rework, the information chaos — the industry has adapted to it. In many cases, it profits from it.

The owner? The school district that just got approval to build a new middle school? The healthcare system expanding into a new market? They’re the ones absorbing the cost overruns, the schedule delays, the frustration of a process that seems designed to disappoint.

There was a stat my commsteam sent me that I thought had to be a typo. McKinsey reported that most construction projects come in over budget by 80%. I pushed back. That’s aggressive, right? They sent me the citation. It’s real.

Eighty percent. If your household bills went up 80% tomorrow, how would you plan your life? And yet this is what we’ve normalized in an industry that builds the infrastructure of modern society.

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Why an Owner’s Rep — Not a Software Company

The obvious question: why not build a SaaS product? Why not build another AI tool and sell it into the ecosystem?

Because I’ve watched that movie before. I’ve invested in those companies. I know how it goes.

You build a great product. You try to sell it to the owner. The owner says, “Interesting — go talk to my contractor.” The contractor says, “We already use Procore.” The architect says, “We already use Autodesk.” And the owner — the originators of a building’s purpose and design, those who live the consequences, those who would benefit most from the technology — never touches it.

Owners don’t build often enough to get up to speed on a set of tools. There’s no self-service model that works. And every AI tool being built for construction right now — the pre-construction tools, the scheduling tools, the estimating tools — they’re not built to give the owner a better, faster, more cost-effective building. They’re built to reduce risk and increase margin for the contractor.

That’s not a conspiracy. That’s just where the buyer is. But it means the owner’s position keeps eroding.

So we made a different choice. We believe the key to transforming the industry’s decades-long productivity decline is by giving owners – the originators of a building’s vision and mission; those closest to the earliest, most consequential development decisions – the tools to change everything. Zero RFI is a human-first, AI-scaffolded owner’s representative. We deploy people — real people, in your office, working alongside you — backed by a deep set of AI tools that they pull from as needed to move faster, see more clearly, and eliminate the information asymmetry that has defined this industry for decades.

We go to owners and help them get their buildings scouted, designed, built, operated, and managed. Full lifecycle, from the moment you’re thinking about a building to the day you’re maintaining it.

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What “Human First, AI Scaffolded” Actually Means

Let me be clear about what we’re not. We’re not a “go to this website and let AI handle it” company. We’re not replacing people with machines.

If you’re building a hospital, I’m deploying a team to your office. That team has a toolbox. In that toolbox are AI capabilities that let them do things that were previously impossible — or at least impractical — for a project team to do in real time.

Here’s the reality on the ground: if you’re a project manager and you get a hundred Procore notifications and fifty emails in a day, you cannot make sense of that information. You just can’t. And that’s where the asymmetry starts. The vendor ecosystem has gotten very good at generating content quickly — stacks of drawings, PDF submittals, BIM models, change orders — and then saying, “Review it, get back to me by tomorrow.”

Every project generates a daily report. It actually has great information in it. You think owners are reading those? You think the current owner’s reps buried in paperwork are analyzing patterns across those reports? No. They’re not.

Our AI does.

The compounding effect of information asymmetry across a project lifecycle is brutal. You go from three watercolor renderings of what the building might be to stacks of submittals to buried change orders. The beginning of a project is the beginning of the end for the owner’s understanding of what they’re getting and what it will cost. It doesn’t get better. It just gets worse.

Our tools change that equation.

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The Name

Zero RFI isn’t aspirational branding. It’s a thesis.

Back in 2005, I built a company that did constructability analysis using BIM. The idea was simple: if we simulate construction before the contractor is hired, we can find problems — virtual RFIs — and fix them before they become real RFIs in the field. Preventative, not reactive.

The problem back then was everything was manual. And you had to act like the contractor knew nothing, which meant you’d flag 30,000 issues, half of which any competent tradesperson would handle without blinking. Errors were easy to find. Omissions were harder because they don’t exist to be flagged — they have to be inferred. And inference requires knowledge.

That’s what’s changed. AI can now infer. Not perfectly. Not alone. But it can look at a set of plans and determine what’s not constructable against a body of knowledge about how buildings actually get built. It can distinguish between “this is genuinely missing from the documents” and “any decent drywall contractor knows what to do here.”

Every RFI on a project represents a failure — a question that shouldn’t have needed to be asked, information that should have been there but wasn’t. Our mission is to drive that number to zero. Not by making RFIs faster to process. By making them unnecessary.

I’ll be honest — we’re not at zero yet. But we’re a lot closer than I thought we’d be when we started building over a year ago. And the LLMs are moving fast. Things we spent months building are now handled out of the box. That’s fine. That’s why we’re venture-backed. The technical debt risk is that Anthropic ships something tomorrow that obsoletes what you built yesterday. You deal with it and keep moving.

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Scaling Through Acquisition

How do you scale a professional services firm? You buy companies.

Zero RFI is part of General Catalyst’s AI roll-up strategy. Our go-to-market is acquiring owner’s rep firms, infusing them with our AI platform, and unlocking growth that they couldn’t achieve on their own.

Here’s what we’ve found through extensive research: owner’s rep firms tend to plateau around 50 people. And that’s often by design — because there aren’t enough skilled people to maintain quality beyond that scale. The partners know that if they grow past 50, the work suffers.

Our thesis is different. With the right AI scaffolding, you don’t need every person to be an expert in everything. Maybe you’re great at finance. Maybe you’re great at client relationship management. Maybe running a meeting is your superpower. But reading a set of structural drawings isn’t your strong suit. That’s what our AI does for you.

We’re not competing with private equity. If someone wants to sell their firm and retire, we’re probably not the right partner. But if you’re a firm that sees where things are going and realizes you don’t have the technical resources or capital to make the leap yourself, we become an ideal partner. And unlike PE, we’re not operating on a three-to-five-year flip cycle. We’re evergreen. There’s no “we have to exit by this date.” We’re building for the long run.

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What This Means for the AEC Industry

I know some people read my stuff and think I’m trying to beat up the industry. I’m not.

I had an engineer tell me recently that when his firm does structural engineering, they deliver three options: reinforced concrete, steel, and wood. They want the client to have optionality. Their competitor just delivers one. And when the owner evaluates proposals, that engineer gets zero credit for providing options. The owner just says, “Everyone else bid reinforced concrete. Match the denominator.”

That’s what the RFP system does. It takes creativity, ingenuity, and innovation, and it drives them down to mediocrity. Because the owner doesn’t have the tools or the knowledge to evaluate what “better” looks like, everything becomes price.

We’re going to change that. We’re launching a program — more details coming soon — that allows firms who want to serve our owners to interface with us differently. If you’re more tech-forward, there will be a benefit to working with us. If you submit a BIM model, our AI will actually check it. Don’t put garbage in there.

Think about what Walmart did to their supply chain. Everyone focuses on Walmart squeezing prices. But a huge part of how they got better prices was by giving their suppliers insights into their own businesses that they didn’t have before. I don’t think any drywall contractor wants to throw 30% of their material into a dumpster. That doesn’t help them. But nobody’s giving them the data to fix it.

We will.

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The Shadow Ventures Connection

For those of you who know me through Shadow Ventures — this is additive, not a departure. I’m deeper in the ecosystem than ever. If anything, building product and using AI tools every day has sharpened my ability to evaluate what founders are doing.

And here’s the strategic piece: Zero RFI creates a massive distribution opportunity for our portfolio companies and for other startups that serve the owner. Most of our founders have told me some version of the same story — “If we could just get to the owner, here’s how our product would help them.” And they get zero traction because owners redirect them to the GC, the GC says “we already have our stack,” and the startup burns another six months of runway on a dead-end sales cycle.

We’re becoming the mega-owner. If your product makes sense for the owner, come talk to us. Dust off that deck. Let’s figure out how to put it to work.

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The Road Ahead

This industry has been doing things a certain way for a long time, and there’s comfort in that. But the numbers don’t lie. Eighty percent over budget. Thirty percent rework. An entire software industry built to manage waste rather than eliminate it.

Every other industry has seen technology drive a deflationary effect on costs. Construction hasn’t. We think we might have an answer.

The mission is simple: risk management is a human job. Uncertainty is a great job for AI.

More to come.

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KP Reddy is the founder and CEO of Zero RFI and General Partner at Shadow Ventures. He publishes Insights by KP weekly and hosts the KP Unpacked podcast. If you’re an owner who’s tired of being the last to know, an AEC firm that wants to differentiate on more than price, or a founder building for the owner — reach out.